So you want to be a field technician (or how to get a field job)

If your college is anything like mine, the career center could give you all sorts of advice on how to land an office job or apply to a pre-professional program. But what if you’re an aspiring ecologist looking for a field research job*? What if you want your office to be a forest, savannah, river,…

Diving into the deep end: teaching my first course

A few years ago, a faculty member at a teaching college was giving a seminar at my university. It’s not often folks from teaching focused institutions pass through, and as someone that is considering positions at liberal arts schools, I was eager to hear what his job was like and what they were looking for…

New Chytrid Fungus in Europe: Clear and present danger to salamanders in US

Mass global extinctions of anurans (frogs and toads) have been an issue of conservation concern for several decades. You’ve likely seen the pictures of deformities and heard stories of beloved ponds gone suddenly silent. However, salamanders, the longer cousins of frogs and toads, have generally fared better. Like anurans, salamanders are threatened by many human…

Dealing with ugly data: Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE)

Recently I’ve been struggling with incorporating auto-correlation into analyses. Auto-correlation can be accounted for with relative ease when your data are normally distributed or can be transformed to be normally distributed. However, if you’re anything like me, rarely are you so lucky. My data are generally proportional, presence/absence (binary), or count data. And in most…